![]() Such a reading also helps narrow the scope of potential locations.Ī search on the official Tastee Freez website turns up no Seymour location. The song’s heavy with a certain restless, rust-belt ennui, so that’s not hard to believe. It’s widely suggested that Mellencamp wrote the song after watching Warren Beatty and Natalie Wood’s fraught young love affair in Splendor in the Grass some fans have also floated the idea that he was inspired by one of his own high-school relationships back in Seymour. In the Vaseline-lensed sixties and seventies in which Mellencamp’s song is set, hundreds of franchises were scattered across America’s heartland. The Tastee Freez chain was founded in 1950 in Illinois. In an attempt to immortalize yet another minor music landmark, Vulture set out to find exactly which Tastee Freez Mellencamp was singing about. With Diane in his lap, Jackie makes a dubious offer to go “dribble off those Bobbie Brooks” - irresistible, apparently, despite his almost-certainly beefy-bean breath. The GMA report specified the line, “Suckin’ on a chili dog outside the Tastee Freez,” going on to note that “the actual Tastee Freez is long gone,” before segueing into Mellencamp’s concerns about the corporatization of middle America and the destruction of family farms (which, in 1985, pushed him to co-found FarmAid).Īs immortalized in the song, the Midwestern frozen-treat stop is a monument to good old-fashioned teenage boredom, wanton horniness, and greasy fast food consumed without any regard for calories or arterial disease. ![]() 1 in October 1982, when Mellencamp was still calling himself John Cougar. Naturally, the story included a mention of the singer’s most famous song, “Jack and Diane,” which hit No. In 2008, ABC’s Good Morning America followed John Mellencamp around his hometown of Seymour, Indiana. Read our previous pieces, about the Red Hot Chili Peppers song “Under the Bridge” and Toni Basil’s “Mickey.” This is the third entry in Vulture’s occasional series: Pop Culture Mysteries. Photo: Jurgen Vollmer/ Redferns Ltd/Getty Images
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